Michael Hartl, author of RailsSpace, is writing The Ruby on Rails Tutorial Book. The book is a top-to-bottom, thorough introduction to Ruby on Rails, and it’s currently up to date with the latest stable release. The first four chapters of Michael’s new book are available online for free right now.

Luis Lavena’s rake compiler-gem aims to standardize the work flow for creating extensions, as well as create some conventions to follow. Rake-compiler allows you to build extensions on multiple platforms, multiple Ruby implementations, and you can even have multiple extensions compiled into a single gem.

Bryan Goines has released the “rails-cmds” gem, or as he more affectionately calls it, “Lazy Rails Commands”. Essentially, it puts all the Rails script commands into binaries. This means that instead of typing "ruby script/console", you can just type "rails-console", and let your shell's autocomplete do the work.

John Woodell has written up how to get started with Ruby on Rails on Google's cloud application service, App Engine. He provides a script that will set up a project locally, and the files you need to run your own development server and publish your app.

Speedy helps you configure your Ruby and Passenger based applications without needing to touch any Apache configuration files. When you want to configure your app, you just navigate to it’s directory in the shell and type speedy deploy, and it will create all of the configuration necessary to deploy that site.

Tile, Rango, and Flotomatic are all covered in today's episode. We also have some version string tools and a recap of RubyConf. Then we rock out to a song about the mountain of woes that is developing for IE.

Recorded at SFO - the San Francisco International Airport - we recap some of the RubyConf 2009 presentations and even get a chance to talk directly with Nick Quaranto, Bryan Helmkamp, Tom Preston Warner, and Ilya Grigorik about their talks.